Today is the North American release day for Dragon Age II, BioWare's role-playing sequel, which will be available in Europe on Friday. In addition to the retail edition, the game is also available online from the EA Store, Direct2Drive, GamersGate, Impulse, and Steam. Also, the BioWare Social Network offers a high-resolution texture pack for the game. Here's word on the 1.08 GB patch: "Using high-resolution textures requires a graphics card with at least 1024MB video memory. Most of the benefits from the Hi-resolution textures will only be seen if you are able to run the game in DirectX 11." For those interested in sampling the game, a playable demo was released last month.

Yeah I spent some more time with it at a friends place (360 version) and I can't see myself picking this up. I could overlook all of the minor stuff and even things like the tactical camera if they weren't so fucking lazy with encounter design. Spawning waves of enemies out of thin air, sometimes from 2 feet away is just absurd and lazy design. It really sucks the fun out of the combat, especially on the higher difficulties.

I think this will be the first Bioware game I haven't purchased. Oh well, back to a Fallout New Vegas modded playthrough.